Eric Sloof

The official statement  from CA about VMware integration is : “Enhanced VMware integration provides increased levels of data protection and backup efficiency within virtual environments�?. But what does it mean?  Well, in the latest release of ARCserve, CA is boosting its support of the VMware virtualization platform. ARCserve r12 provides a feature that enables physical-to-virtual server restore. That means that during a disaster recovery scenario, an enterprise can initiate bare-metal recovery of physical server backups to VMware virtual servers.

Vizioncore announced vConverter, the fastest, easiest and most reliable tool for performing physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) machine conversions. Customers working with VMware, Microsoft, XenServer or Virtual Iron environments can use vConverter to significantly simplify, automate and accelerate the machine to machine conversion process, maximize system availability and eliminate any potential impact on physical systems.  As customers increasingly look to standardize on virtual infrastructures, the reliability and performance of conversion tools are critical factors in ensuring that migration projects are as non-disruptive and require as few man-hours as possible. Server consolidation initiatives often allow only a few hours at weekends in order to perform conversions, so a fast, reliable tool that automates many of the manual pre- and post-migration tasks is critical to achieving maximum successful P2V conversions per time window.

With the launch of VMware Infrastructure 3 version 3.5 comes a new version of VMware’s hypervisor, ESX Server 3.5. One of the core focus areas for Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 is to enable greater uptime and agility in the management of the virtual infrastructure environment. VMware has addressed this by bringing new levels of flexibility and connectivity options to Virtual Infrastructure 3 version 3.5.  This document provides information about the following storage enhancements in VMware Infrastructure 3 version 3.5:

o Storage VMotion
o N-Port ID virtualization support
o InfiniBand support
o SATA support
o Round robin load balancing
o VMotion with swap files on local storage
o Network based storage performance enhancements

Mastering VMware Infrastructure 3 offers a strong design component followed by an in-depth look at the day-to-day tasks that make virtualization a key technology for any enterprise. Having access to a massive server infrastructure, the authors are able to provide real-world examples and best practices that apply to the integral parts of the virtual administrator's professional life. Topics include creating and managing virtual networks, creating and managing storage devices, migrating and importing virtual machines, managing and monitoring resource access, and protecting data.

The Most Complete, Practical, Solutions-Focused Guide to Running ESX Server 3. VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise is the definitive, real-world guide to planning, deploying, and managing today’s leading virtual infrastructure platform in mission-critical environments. Drawing on his extensive experience consulting on large-scale ESX Server implementations, Edward L. Haletky brings together an unprecedented collection of tips, best practices, and field-tested solutions. More than any other author, he illuminates the real issues, tradeoffs, and pitfalls associated with ESX Server–and shows how to make the most of it in your unique environment. Haletky covers the entire lifecycle: planning, installation, system monitoring, tuning, clustering, security, disaster recovery, and much more. Throughout, he supports his recommendations with examples from real-world deployments. He also provides detailed checklists for handling crucial issues such as caching, networking, storage, and hardware selection. Many of his techniques and practices apply to all current virtualization platforms, not just ESX Server. This book will be an indispensable resource for every network architect, administrator, and IT professional who works with virtual servers. ESX Server newcomers will find the soup-to-nuts introduction they desperately need; experienced users will find an unparalleled source of field-tested answers and solutions.

Since Thinstall is acquired by VMware I was wondering what Thinstall’s advice for a virtual  SetupCapture server  would be and found the following how to : When creating a Thinstall project using SetupCapture, they recommend using a "clean" install of Windows. If you don't already have a clean PC sitting around for this purpose, they recommend using a product like VMWare to maintain a clean image of Windows.  With VMWare, you can install Windows into a virtual machine one time and take a "snapshot" of the entire machine in its clean state (no application installed). Then after you have used Thinstall's Setup Capture application to capture an application's install, you can use VMWare to discard your changes and revert the virtual machine to a clean state where it is ready to capture a new application.  The guide shows how to install and configure VMWare Server with a base clean OS. As of this writing, VMWare Server is available for free from VMWare. MSDN subscribers can also obtain a free license to a similar product from Microsoft called VirtualPC. They recommend VMWare over VirtualPC if you have a choice in selection....

Schley Andrew Kutz  over at Lostcreations introduced Monét - Monét (as in "Count de...") stands for "Monitors Events and Tasks" and monitors an ESX or VirtualCenter? server, recording tasks to standard out, a syslog server, or a Windows event log server. This application teaches several important VI3 SDK concepts: creating property filters, waiting on updates, and creating multi-threaded VI3 SDK utilities. Monét comes in a variety of flavors; it is currently implemented using Microsoft .NET with C# 2.0, the VI Perl Toolkit, and Java. There is running a tread about Monét and vm4all.com has been updated.

David Davis over at Happy Router is excited to say that his VMware ESX Server video training course is officially available! After creating the popular Microsoft Virtualization and VMware Server & Workstation video series, he has just finished VMware ESX Server. ESX Server is VMware's Enterprise grade, high-end virtualization product and it is in use by so many companies today. He spent 3 months researching VMware ESX Server and the Virtual Infrastructure Suite and made every effort to cover the VMware ESX Server applications from all aspects including designing, installing, creating virtual machines, virtual networks, SAN storage, VCB backups, and performance tuning. His VMware ESX Server Training is your complete video guide to mastering VMware ESX Server and Virtual Infrastructure. When you want to take a peak you can  view a 7 minutes training video demo covering VMware ESX Server Installation & Using Virtual Center.

This month vRanger Pro, vReplicator, vCharter and vMigrator will all fully support VMware ESX Server 3.5. In December, VMware announced general availability of this major update in the VMware Infrastructure 3 platform. ESX Server 3.5 provides improved memory processing, reduced CPU overhead, and support for paravirtualized Linux to help improve performance of Linux workloads.
VMware has also introduced ESX Server 3i, which they are offering in addition to ESX Server 3.5, their market leading hypervisor. This product offers all of the same functionality but with a thin 32 MB footprint that provides unparalleled security and reliability, while integration as server firmware makes deployment fast and easy. ESX Server 3i will be available integrated in server systems from market leading server vendors. At this time, support for ESX Server 3i in Vizioncore's products is scheduled for Q2 2008.
As always, Vizioncore is committed to keeping pace with developments of the VMware Infrastructure platform. As a Community Source member and a Technology Alliance Program partner, Vizioncore remains at the forefront of development of the VMware platform. Vizioncore's solutions extend the business value of VMware investments for customers around the world.

I found an interesting article from Warren in the VMware community about the limitations of using SQL Express as the VirtualCenter database server. Beware of SQL Express & undocumented loss of some important features in VirtualCenter, confirmed by VMware. Just a quick note to warn people away from "upgrading" to SQL Express with VirtualCenter 2.5. If you do, you will probably be sorry. Due to Microsoft removing the SQLAgent in this "lite" version, there is no automation. This means that there is no way for VirtualCenter to do things like roll up the daily data into weekly and monthly views, or perform scheduled truncations, cleanup or backups. They will be noting (some of) this in some future release of the documentation, but it's not in there today. Please see http://communities.vmware.com/message/832082 for details on my problems with missing performance data. In that thread you will find reference to a couple service tickets that you can reference in your communications with them, if you bump into this or related issues.